There is still time to register for the 16th annual GCLC conference on ex-post assessment of EU competition enforcement. We will examine landmark cases to understand whether public intervention has made a difference.

On January 19th, our experts Aleksandra Boutin will discuss lessons learned from the Commission Microsoft cases, focusing on the leveraging theories of harm, and will provide some insights for the way forward in the digital markets. Many thanks to Nicolas Petit and Assimakis Komninos for this fantastic initiative.

Ex-post assessment of European competition enforcement: Did agency intervention restore competition in the market?

The ex-post analysis of competition law decisions is becoming a key issue. Competition policy’s commitment to efficiency in decision-making, together with legitimate demands for accountability, has led to an increased interest among agencies in learning from the past through retrospective case studies. Unfortunately, in practice, competition agencies often find it difficult to evaluate the benefits and costs of past interventions in markets.

From a policy perspective, retrospectives raise several difficult questions: Did past competition policy interventions or non-interventions work? Have competition remedies restored or preserved market competition? If policy mistakes were made, what can we learn from them? And more fundamentally, what are the costs of competition enforcement compared to its benefits?

This year, the GCLC’s 2021 Annual Conference will discuss the results of a research project conducted by GCLC last year on the ex-post assessment of competition enforcement in Europe. At this unprecedented event, economists, business scholars, legal practitioners, and enforcers will use the benefit of hindsight to review past competition cases.